According to Reuters AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been meeting with top shareholders in the past couple of weeks to push the idea of a sale to Yahoo. He thinks that the deal could save his outfit more than $1.5 billion and give Yahoo a pretty good new direction to move towards.

Of course, Yahoo has many problems of its own, so writing a cheque to AOL would not be high on its list of things to do. But Armstrong said a merger between AOL and Yahoo could wring out $1 billion to $1.5 billion in savings from overlapping data centers and duplicate news sites, such as sports, entertainment and finance.

The deal would also appease ad agencies looking for more efficient buys with a bigger audience. But it could also arrange a deal with Microsoft. AOL, Vole and Yahoo have worked before on an advertising partnership to go up against Google.